Phil Mulloy was born in Wallasey, Cheshire, and was educated locally before attending Ravensbourne Art College in South London, where he studied painting. After completing a short animated film as part of his entrance requirements for the Royal College of Art, he specialised in making live-action film and television material. Mulloy graduated in 1971 and worked as a writer and director until the late Eighties. A move to Wales saw a shift in Mulloy's work, and he began to make animated films on a full-time basis in a converted cowshed near Carmarthen.

Eye of the Storm (1989) was a study of a child coming to terms with human brutality, and featured startling imagery influenced by the hanging of Russian prisoners of war. Such work anticipates the iconoclastic dynamism of a decade which followed, and the extensive thematic preoccupation of man's inhumanity to man. Possession (1990), a mixture of live-action and animation, based on the Red Riding Hood story, explores the symbolic tension between the wolf as an agent of chaos, and the woodcutter as the imposer of order; a metaphoric site Mulloy consistently engages with to expose the illusory, contradictory and nihilistic aspects of 'civilised' society.

The six-part series for Channel Four, Cowboys (1991), brought his work to national and international prominence. Mulloy consolidated his commitment to animation as a liberating vehicle through which he could engage with any issue in any context or genre, and showed how he could achieve this in a personal, 'auteurist' fashion on a highly cost-effective basis. The success of these highly amusing 'takes' on generic codes and conventions, and their address of masculinity in a crisis of excess, prompted Mulloy to pursue these themes further in a series of more personal films. The Sound of Music, his 1992 masterpiece, engages with the deep-rooted sexual and class-based politics of a seemingly arbitrary and violent culture. Direct, witty and challenging, Mulloy's work stands as a model of satiric grotesque unparalleled in British animation. His Ten Commandments (1994-1996) builds on this technique, allying the surreal to the social, and cleverly exposes a God who, by making man in His own image, effectively demonstrates His own flaws, pettiness, and indifference. This God is as inhumane as the humanity he has created. Mulloy's various perspectives in The History of the World (1994) are just as fearless in their uninhibited assault on conservative sensibilities.

Mulloy illustrates and interprets the unspeakable and the unjust, knowing that these are the very commonalities in the human condition ignored, marginalised or explicitly repressed in other artworks, but familiar to his viewers. The more specifically personal films share all the preoccupations of the Cowboys and Ten Commandments series, and his best work is characterised by the relationship between the brutalist imagery and the counterpointing, often discordant, soundtracks of his collaborator, Alex Balanescu. The Sound of Music and The Wind of Changes (1996), examples of Mulloy's finest work, are commentaries on the necessity for art to be individualistic and expressive in the face of cultures that exhibit indifference or outright hostility to aesthetic and intellectual 'difference'. Both films reject authoritarianism, materialism and conformism, and promote art, and especially music, as the conduit for liberation and individual assertion. A more playful take on these themes is evident in Intolerance (2000) and Intolerance II: The Invasion (2001) which examine conformism by parodying the science fiction invasion narratives of alien takeover and incipient paranoia. The power and intensity of such imagery not only vindicate animation as a unique form of expression, but also reveal Phil Mulloy as a perceptive critic of the inequality, hypocrisy and conflict underpinning contemporary life. (via)